
Linux Hardware Reviews, Performance Benchmarks & Open-Source / Free Software News
Updated: 2 hours 53 min ago
Vim 9.0 Released With New Vim9 Script For 10~100x Execution Speed
Vim 9.0 is out as the first major update in two years for this popular text editor. With Vim 9.0 comes the Vim9 scripting language that offers significantly better performance...
NVIDIA 515.57 Linux Driver Released With Fixes, NvFBC Improvements
In addition to announcing the GeForce GTX 1630 budget card today (expect our Linux review soon), NVIDIA published 515.57 as their newest stable NVIDIA Linux driver release...
Fedora 37 Gets A Batch Of New Features Approved
The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved a fresh batch of features for the next Fedora Linux distribution release...
GCC 10.4 Released With 200+ Bug Fixes
For those not yet on the GCC 11 or GCC 12 stable series, GCC 10.4 is out today as the latest in that older stable series...
Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan Driver Continues Outperforming AMDVLK For RDNA2 Linux Gaming
With last week seeing AMDVLK 2022.Q2.3 released as an update to AMD's official open-source Vulkan Linux driver and it noting performance improvements, it was time for some fresh benchmarks of that driver up against Mesa's alternative "RADV" Vulkan driver. Here are some fresh benchmarks with an AMD RDNA2 GPU for seeing how RADV continues competing -- and usually outperforming -- AMD's own official open-source driver.
Intel Brews Linux Change For More Efficient Idle CPU Searching Under Heavy System Load
A "sched/fair" scheduler change queued this morning into TIP's sched/core for Linux 5.20 aims to enhance the efficiency when searching for an idle CPU under heavy system load. The change led by Intel should improve the kernel's efficiency when the system is overloaded but as with most low-level tuning does run the risk of regressions...
Mesa's Lima Gallium3D Driver Lands 4x MSAA Support
A decade after Luc Verhaegen started the Lima driver effort for reverse-engineering Arm Mali graphics, developers continue occasionally working on improvements to this Gallium3D driver for older generations of Mali hardware. The most recent feature work is finally enabling 4x MSAA support...
Intel Begins Publishing Habana Labs Gaudi2 Linux Driver Code
Last month for their Vision conference, Intel announced the Habana Labs Gaudi2 accelerator. Gaudi2 is the second-generation offering from Intel-owned Habana Labs for training and inference. The open-source Linux kernel driver support for Gaudi2 is now getting underway along with accompanying open-source user-space software stack support...
Git 2.37 Released With Sparse Index Feature Now Ready For Widespread Use
Git 2.37 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, distributed revision control system...
GCC-Rust Feedback Sought - Possibly Aiming For Upstream In GCC 13
The Rust-GCC front-end that allows Rust code to be compiled with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) could possibly be upstreamed for next year's GCC 13 compiler release but not necessarily complete at that stage. In any case, it's good seeing progress on Rust-GCC as an alternative to Rust's official LLVM-based compiler...
Linux "RADV" Radeon Driver Gets A Big Speed-Up For 16-bit FidelityFX Super Resolution
Merged today to Mesa 22.2 was a four month old merge request for the open-source Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" that significantly improves the 16-bit FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) performance...
Intel Releases OSPRay Studio v0.11 Visualization / Ray-Tracing App
One of Intel's many wonderful open-source projects for creators is OSPRay Studio that is their interactive visualization and ray-tracing application built atop their OSPRay portable ray-tracing engine. OSPRay Studio has been making steady progress since its 2020 debut and out today is their newest update...
Firefox 102 Available With Transform Streams, Geoclue On Linux
The Firefox 102.0 release is now available for download ahead of its stable release announcement tomorrow...
The Performance Cost To A Proposed Fedora 37 CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS Change
Coming about last week was a Fedora 37 change proposal to improve the profiling and debugging of Fedora packages but with possible performance costs. That suggested change is about adding "-fno-omit-frame-pointer" to the default CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS when building packages so the frame pointer is always available for improving the debugging/profiling of the stock Fedora packages. Unfortunately, it can come with significant performance costs as these benchmarks show.
F2FS File-System Driver Preparing A Low-Memory Mode
Google engineers are working on the notion of "memory modes" for the Flash-Friendly File-System (F2FS) with the intent on introducing a "low memory" mode for storage devices that would alter its behavior. Presumably Google is working on this new F2FS feature for low-end Android devices...
Linux 5.19-c4 - A Bit Bigger, Also Fixes A Previously Reported Performance Regression
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.19-rc4 as the newest weekly test candidate. There are more patches this week than in the prior Linux 5.19-rc versions but nothing too scary as well as having some notable patches in tow...
liburing 2.2 Released For Easier IO_uring Usage On Linux
Jens Axboe, Linux storage expert and IO_uring lead developer, released liburing 2.2 this weekend as the newest version of this helper library that makes it easier for user-space software to make use of the Linux kernel's IO_uring support...
NVIDIA Lands AV1 VDPAU Hardware Acceleration In FFmpeg
NVIDIA has contributed support to the FFmpeg multimedia library for being able to take advantage of AV1 GPU-accelerated video decoding by way of the VDPAU API when using the latest-generation NVIDIA RTX 30 "Ampere" GPUs...
Microsoft's CBL-Mariner 2.0 Linux Distro Now Supports Kernel Live Patching, PXE Boot
Last month Microsoft issued the first production release of CBL-Mariner 2.0, its in-house Linux distribution used for powering services from Microsoft Azure to WSL use-cases and more. CBL-Mariner 2.0 this weekend saw a rather large monthly update with a number of fixes, package updates, and new additions to this "Common Base Linux" platform...
Shotcut 22.06 Video Editor Adds Support For Lottie Animations, Filter Improvements
Shotcut remains one of the leading open-source, cross-platform video editors built atop the MLT Multimedia Framework with FFmpeg. Out this week is Shotcut 22.06 as the newest feature update to this non-linear video editing solution...